The pervasiveness of computing devices has increased the need and attention given to security of the devices. Besides the need to design and implement hardware and software that works compatibly in increasingly complex systems, designers must account for security issues due to external sources and to failures of the system itself. External security issues may be caused, for example, by viruses, worms, phishing attempts, or other security attacks or potential security compromises. Failures of the system itself or internal security issues may be caused, for example, by system errors, bugs, incompatibility issues, or other design or implementation issues.
One effort to allow for the prevention of and reaction to system errors is the use of a service partition on the computing device. Service partitions may be reserved or provisioned in a number of different ways. However, traditional systems typically all have access to service partitions through the host system, such as through the operating system. Thus, if the host system becomes compromised, the security of the service partition is suspect.
Some systems support the use of a third (or 3rd) party data store (3PDS). For example, systems available from Intel Corporation of Santa Clara, Calif. provide 3PDS. However, current 3PDS and service partition solutions are frequently small (e.g., a 192 KB partition on many Intel systems), and inflexible. Splitting the partition among multiple ISVs (independent software vendors, or vendors that produce software to execute on a platform) may provide too little storage to be very useful. In addition to inflexibility with the configuration of the partition, the partitions may have static interfaces that are not convenient in their usability for the ISVs.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.